Tuesday, October 20, 2009

More Annoyance of PDFs

As if Acrobat Reader's pointless bloatedness wasn't annoying enough, I have just noticed two more annoying things about it:
  1. It now seems to contain some kind of online chat/meeting functionality. I have never felt the need to start an "Acrobat Connect" meeting and I don't think I ever will.
  2. Whenever it updates itself (which feels too often), it makes me reboot my computer. Why on earth would that be necessary?
On the plus side, at least the Acrobat Reader plugin no longer makes my entire browser freeze up while a PDF is loading.

On balance, it would be nice if there was a small and lean piece of software that could view PDFs and not do any of the annoying stuff.

4 comments:

jonathanj said...

Have you tried Foxit Reader? It looks like there is an add-on for Firefox, too.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/addons.htm

jonathanj said...

Have you tried Foxit Reader? It looks like there is an add-on for Firefox, too.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/addons.htm

jonathanj said...

Oh. I totally posted that comment twice. I didn't notice the bit where it says that it will be visible after approval. I hate the way you have to sign in at the same time as you write your comment. You never know if your comment is still going to be there, if you get your password wrong.
It's also pretty annoying that Opera has saved the verification word in my password list, so when I click the magic wand, which is now a key, not a magic wand, it submits the form with the word from some previous time when I commented on this tedious blog.
nololz

Chris said...

I have tried Foxit. It is a lot slimmer and less bloated than Acrobat Reader. On the negative side, I have encountered some PDFs that it can't cope with. Oh dear!